


watch it all recede

by inheritedjeans



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Episode Tag, F/M, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-22
Updated: 2014-02-22
Packaged: 2018-01-13 08:42:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1219849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inheritedjeans/pseuds/inheritedjeans
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Petra Ral is dead, but not yet gone. There are some things she needs to say, first.</p>
            </blockquote>





	watch it all recede

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks, alasweneverdo, for humouring me when all I want to do is write questionable fic.

When she opens her eyes, the world has frozen over with an empty cold. Petra stands on legs that no longer feel the exhaustion born of constant living, of sinew and bone and muscle all fighting together for every movement her body had made. The air around her billows and cinches. As she stands in the forest of giant trees, Petra feels like this is what true flying must feel like: bending and swaying with every gasp of the wind. Strange, that she can only feel this expansive freedom now, when she’s struck to stillness by the sight of her own shattered face. Blood thickens in the hollows of her eyes and her mouth gapes in grotesque surprise. The green of her Scouting Legion cloak bears thick stains of burgundy and the fabric crumples stiffly. At least she still looks like herself -- if there’s anything at all okay about this, it’s that she will not be a faceless corpse to be buried without a name to distinguish her. 

Between the tree leaves that fan high above her, light arcs down, twisting over the ground as the wind shakes through the forest and sways through her airy limbs. The daylight bleeds the air of warmth.

It ought to be sunset. This whole process of dying and waiting -- it ought to be happening as the sun sets, golden and massive against the horizon. Would be more poetic. But the sun still shines a yellow noon in the pale blue sky. This way at least, she will be found without difficulty, her hair a bright copper that pops against the foliage and shines in the flickering light. Petra sits, leaning back against a massive tree trunk, and waits for Levi to find her; the darkness that sits in the corners of her eyes, no matter which way she looks, waits for her in turn. It busies itself with swallowing Gunther, Eld, Auruo whole, but Petra isn’t ready yet.

“I won’t be long,” Petra says, voice thick and faceted with all the angles of her life now gone. “Don’t wait up. I just need to say some things. I won’t be long.”

Auruo frowns, but for once in his damn life -- no, that’s not quite right anymore. He frowns, but stays uncharacteristically quiet as he fades away along with Gunther and Eld.

The world wraps cold arms tight around her and squeezes, but Petra doesn’t shiver; won’t ever have to again.

\--

(It is the captain of Special Operations who finds her first. Petra is relieved. It is her captain, and he greets the sight of her death with terrifying fury in his eyes, for all that his hands as he wraps her body in thick canvas are gentle and shaking.)

\--

There are a million things Petra wishes she could tell him, but most of all, it is that her corpse was nothing special. And it isn’t -- it’s enough that he has seen her, marked down as killed in action, taken her crest with a painful gentleness. That no pyre will send her ashes soaring into the sky is nothing, next to keeping him alive as the titans close in behind him. Levi had often told them, his soldiers, that to worship a corpse is pointless; that something much smaller will serve just as well, when a soldier will remain dead regardless.

\-- 

(It was the captain who found her, but it is Levi who reads her last letters. It is Levi, sitting on the bed they had sometimes shared and reading her last letters, tracing the harried pen strokes with white-cold fingers. His face is empty, and at that, she _does_ shiver.)

\--

The thing is that if the dead could talk to the living, Petra would have known of it. Too many of her friends have died and left behind nothing but silence for her to believe in the legend of the witching hour. He won’t hear her, but still -- there are some things she needs to say; there’s a goodbye she has yet to hear. The Darkness lurking at her heels can wait just a little while longer.

The moon edges up along the bottom crest of the window, on the rise in the early hours of the night. It burns cold lines over the straight edges of Petra’s crisply-pulled bedsheets and mingles briefly with the warmth of the candle only recently set to burn on her nightstand. It alights on Levi’s hair, caps him with a crown of silver, and Petra aches because this is a sight she will never see for true: Levi, gone grey and old, weathered by time and circumstance. But then, he looks old already.

“I’m sorry,” he says, dropping the last letters Petra wrote onto her desk in a flutter of loose pages. The words break like a summer thunderstorm around her. For a moment, he looks like he might say more, throat working silently, but he just bows his head and breathes deep, mouth pressed shut. One hand curls around the edges of the badge he had torn from her coat.

“No, stop that,” Petra says. “We all knew.” Levi doesn’t so much as flinch; Petra feels only a vague disappointment. “We all were ready to give our lives. We all knew the risks. Don’t be sorry -- I never was, so you can’t be either, okay?” 

On the bed on which they had so often curled together, quiet and steady, Levi perches like a stranger, slight enough -- and he would glare so murderously if he were to hear her say this -- that the bed barely dips beneath him. For so slight a man, Petra has never seen him look so small before, bowed under the weight of so many dead on his watch. Once upon a time, after a commonplace, disastrous expedition beyond the walls, Petra had watched Levi stand firm and steady as all others grieved openly around him, too accustomed to loss to let anything show on his face. Petra had been new to the Special Ops, and terrified to think that one day she too would lose humanity enough that mourning her friends was no longer an instinctual reaction. But back then, Petra hadn’t watched Levi closely enough to understand his tells: the small tightening around his eyes, the pinching of his mouth, the careful way he would tear a badge from the jacket of each fallen soldier.

Now, Petra knows how heavily Levi burdens himself with grief, no less after all these years than he had when his career was nascent yet. Accustomed to loss, yes, but he never became inured to it.

Levi’s throat heaves his next words out slowly.

“You of all people… You should have known it foolish to devote yourself to me.”

Petra huffs, indignant and irritated for the first time since she awoke to her death: she _would_ have known, is the thing. Petra remembers well the first time she stumbled across the graveyard of crests filling Levi’s nightstand drawer. She knew from so early on, perhaps better than anyone save Commander Erwin, how unlikely it was that a permanent place in Levi’s Special Operations Squad would last longer than a year on the outside.

“It wasn’t to you, Arschgesicht! No matter what my father -- don’t you know me better than to think I’d risk my life every day just to spend time with you? No, but I had to tell him something he would understand, didn’t I?”

Levi clenches his jaw and breathes out heavily through his nose. 

“No, stop, listen!” And here, some familiarity: Petra, asking for an ear, and Levi, not wanting to give one. “I knew what I was doing, and don’t you dare take that from me. I knew what I was doing and you -- you were just a bonus I never would have thought to ask for. Even if you never did cave and tell me a single thing about your life before the Legion, I knew you. You let me, and it made everything so much better. Thank you.”

Levi curls up on his side on top of the sheets, clutching her crest so it stay carefully unbent in his grasp. The hollows of his eyes are dark and familiar and, oh, Petra will miss him. He turns his face into her pillow and settles in, maybe close to sleeping or -- and this, far more likely -- maybe waiting to gather himself for the walk back to his quarters to finish writing condolence letters.

It needs to happen soon, now, her disappearance into the darkness that crawls ever faster towards her, swallowing this ghostly place of In Between in a maw more massive than a titan’s, though one infinitely more comforting. Time slips strange across the sky until, sooner than she would have wished, dawn bleeds over the horizon in great red swathes. Levi blinks twice and abruptly stands, pausing to snap the sheets back into military straightness over the mattress, and leans over the letters still waiting on her desk. They crinkle under the gentle tracing of his fingers as he straightens the edges of each piece of paper until they lie perfectly even atop each other. He folds them into precise squares and leaves them there, waiting on her desk for her father to come and take them away. The last of her he still can bury.

Her badge he tucks into his breast pocket. He doesn’t ever say it, the goodbye, but this feels like the best she could ask for, regardless.

“Captain,” she says, snapping to a sharp salute. “Levi.”

And maybe he turns at that, or maybe he turns to listen to the wind against the window. And maybe the tilt of his head and the slight downturn of his mouth was drawn out by her voice, or maybe by the sight of the sky burning alive behind her. The salute he snaps back, however, is all for Petra, regardless of whether or not he knows she’s there.

Petra turns into the darkness at last.  
\--.


End file.
